John Holloway: Perspectives in the Storm
Anticapitalist sociologist John Holloway—renowned for his work on revolution and social movements—spoke at the Peoples’ Platform Europe in Vienna, delivering a powerful message on rejecting capitalist inhumanity and building new forms of social connection. Below an excerpt from his speech:
Anger. We come here to express our anger. Our anger against the militarisation of the world, our anger against the heating of the planet that threatens us with suffering and extinction, our anger against the dehumanising treatment of migrants, our anger against feminicides and all the violence of patriarchy.
But not just anger. Hope. We come not just because we are angry but because we want to change things. Hope is our great pushing force. Not a happy-happy hope, not an empty wishful thinking, but an angry hope. A determined, reasoned hope that we can, must and will change the world. […]
Desperation: a determination to change a bad or dangerous situation. That is where we are, in a very bad and dangerous situation. The Zapatistas call it the Storm, la Tormenta. We can feel it all around us, we can hear the winds howling more and more loudly with each day that passes. And we know that it is likely to get much worse, that it could lead to much greater catastrophe, even to the extinction of humanity.
Desperation is hope in the storm, hope in-and-against the storm, hope in-against-and-beyond the storm. We do not just want to survive the storm, but to stop it and create something else. At a Zapatista conference, Marcos imagines a telephone conversation with a young girl who lives in the future, 120 years from now. The digitally sophisticated comrades who have set up the streaming for the conference have managed to set up a connection with a community in the year 2145. It is a young girl who answers the phone and Marcos asks ‘how are you?’. The girl replies ‘it depends’. Marcos curses, wishing that it had been an adult that had picked up the phone. ‘How do you mean, it depends?’ he asks. The girl answers: ‘it depends on you’, and the connection is lost.
It depends on you, that is, it depends on us, on our ability to organise our desperation, the desperation that has brought us here today. The sort of life our great-great-great grandchildren will lead, and whether they ever exist at all, depends on us.
We want to win. It seems almost shocking to say this, we are so accustomed to losing. But now we want to win and we must win. We must stop the dynamic that is destroying the world, we want the girl in 120 years’ time to have a life and to have a life of freedom and happiness.
Leave a Reply